Full Comment’s Araminta Wordsworth brings you a daily round-up of quality punditry from across the globe. Today: They look like your mother, your sister, your grandmother, your daughter.

Many of today’s Roman Catholic nuns wear civilian clothes, not the familiar black habits, and are out in the world, rather than being cloistered in a convent. They work in soup kitchens, run homeless shelters and clinics providing free medical care. Their work brings them in contact with the dregs of society — the poor, the dispossessed and the helpless. They worry about children not getting enough to eat or abused women who have nowhere to turn.

Small wonder such experiences have made them agents for change. But as far as the Church is concerned it is the wrong change.

The nuns are outspoken on issues of social justice, but do not appear overly concerned about abortion and gay marriage, hot-button topics for the Holy See, as well as U.S. Republicans.

The Vatican, which persists in seeing the nuns as uppity women who should be put firmly in their place, has censured the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) for “radical feminism.”

It has also banned a book by Sister Margaret Farley. Just Love: a Framework for Christian Social Ethics poses “grave harm” to the faithful, it says. Among other things, the nun suggests masturbation is not a sin.

The Catholic Church desperately needs to gain moral wisdom in its sexual ethics. The church around the world has been wracked by scandals over child sexual abuse, and the crisis is far from over. The Catholic Church’s continues to reject homosexual unions in marriage as one of the gifts of God’s creation and therefore good, and the full equality of women in ordination to the priesthood has not yet been achieved. Yet, in recent months, instead of focusing on these crucial issues, the Vatican has chosen to target Dr. Margaret Farley’s work, as well as ministry of the largest umbrella group of American nuns, a group known for its work with the poor. The Vatican has subjected these nuns to investigation and criticism for “radical feminism.”

The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd sees the moves as part of the Vatican’s thuggish crusade to push American nuns — and all Catholic women — back into mouldy subservience.

The Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, which seems as hostile to women as the Saudi Committee for the Promotion of Virtue & the Prevention of Vice, spent years pondering Just Love, then censured it on March 30 but didn’t publicly release the statement until Monday. The denunciation of Sister Farley’s book is based on the fact that she deals with the modern world as it is. She refuses to fall in line with a Vatican rigidly clinging to an inbred, illusory world where men rule with no backtalk from women, gays are deviants, the divorced can’t remarry, men and women can’t use contraception, masturbation is a grave disorder and celibacy is enshrined, even as a global pedophilia scandal rages.

John L. Allen Jr., a Rome-based correspondent and commentator at the National Catholic Reporter, believes,

The story has become a cause célèbre, primarily because of the deep fault lines it seems to encapsulate: men vs. women, family values vs. women’s issues (especially in a domestic political season in which an alleged “war on women” is in the air), Rome vs. America, left vs. right, authority vs. dissent, the hierarchy vs. the grassroots .… [The] fallout from the LCWR fracas … illustrates another persistent tension in Catholic life, between what one might call the “prophetic” and “communal” instincts. The former wants to push the church to realize the best version of itself (as a given prophet might understand it), while the latter regards having a place at the table as at least as important as getting one’s own way. Prophets want hard choices to be made while community folks are more willing to tolerate compromise as the best way of holding the family together.

Incidentally, the ban has done wonders for Just Love sales. By late Wednesday, it was No. 14 on Amazon’s Best Seller List. It was also out of stock.

Meanwhile, the sisters are pushing back. While LCWR leaders are flying to Rome to plead their case, a group of nuns is planning a bus trip, reports Laurie Goodstein at The New York Times.

[This will stop] at homeless shelters, food pantries, schools and health-care facilities run by nuns to highlight their work with the nation’s poor and disenfranchised … The sisters plan to use the tour also to protest cuts in programs for the poor and working families in the federal budget passed by the House of Representatives and proposed by Representative Paul D. Ryan, (R-Wis.), who cited his Catholic faith to justify the cuts.

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